Five Lessons from Julia Galef’s ‘The Scout Mindset’

[Kamaji]

Five Lessons from Julia Galef’s ‘The Scout Mindset’

Jon Hersey
04 Feb 2022

Respect for reason has waxed and waned throughout history. Today, its tide is receding. University professors resign in frustration from what were once our bastions of rationality. Increasingly, the barbarians are not merely at the gates, but running the show in a vast swathe of humanities departments. After decades of decay in our academic training grounds, radical identitarianism and other irrationalities are spreading with accelerating speed, and we are woefully short of thinkers capable of fighting them.

Those few who are working to diagnose and cure our culture deserve our attention and appreciation. Among them are Stephen Hicks and Helen Pluckrose, for mucking around in the sewers of postmodernism and cataloging the causes of our predicament; Virginia Postrel, Johan Norberg, Matt Ridley, and Steven Pinker, for reminding us of the importance of dynamism, the open society, progress, and enlightenment; and more recently, social scientists and practitioners such as Adam Grant and Julia Galef for their tips and techniques on cultivating and preserving objectivity.

A few months back, I shared six important lessons from Grant’s latest book, Think Again. Here are five more from Galef’s latest, The Scout Mindset.

1. It’s easier than you think to fall into motivated reasoning

It’s a tale as old as time: A man thinks he’s being evenhanded in assessing something, only to later learn that bias had disfigured his evaluation. Some prior conviction concealed a blind spot and kept him from asking pertinent questions.

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2. The solution is not mere knowledge, but mindset cultivated into habit

Galef is the host of the podcast “Rationally Speaking” and a co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, which holds workshops on rational thinking and avoiding cognitive biases. But after a few years teaching these workshops, Galef concluded that knowledge of common logical fallacies and biases, while helpful, is not enough. We need a whole new mindset.

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3. When it’s important, conduct a thought experiment

Many thought experiments are suitable only for confounding freshman philosophy students. But Galef’s collection here is useful. Here are six she recommends:

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Source:  https://quillette.com/2022/02/04/five-lessons-from-julia-galefs-the-scout-mindset/